Rosenthal On CBA Talks

Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports has the latest on the talks between the players' union and owners as they aim to strike a new collective bargaining agreement…

It's a coin flip that an agreement will occur during the World Series, a source with knowledge of the discussions tells Rosenthal. While that goal remains within reach, Rosenthal says the more important target date is the opening of free agency five days after the Series. If no agreement is reached by then, it will create a new set of issues. The World Series will end between October 23rd and 27th this year.

Rosenthal hears the players and owners remain far apart on the owners' request for hard slotting in the amateur draft, yet the gulf could narrow quickly.

The new deal is expected to include big changes for 2013: two 15-team leagues and a new one-game wild card round for the postseason. The Astros' situation is fluid, hears Rosenthal. They're the team most likely to move to the AL if new owner Jim Crane is approved.

I think it should be limited to four 3 game series a year. (2 home 2 away) Playing for a month is inane. I also think “natural” rivals should play each other once every 4 years. The Yankees/Mets games mean nothing more than a Yankees/A’s game for me.

You are watering down the field. I’m sick of it. The one wildcard spot was great, and now we’re going to have a situation where Team A at 94-68 is playing Team B at 88-74 and anything can happen. Team A can be fighting in division and lose out to Team C, who wins division at 95-67. Then Team A, clearly better, has their no. 4 starter go out against Team B’s no. 1.

I just freaking confused myself there, but you can basically see how this can quickly become very complicated. Do you shut down in preparation for the one-game wildcard or do you continue to push and risk having to use guys on short rest or the 3 or 4 starter? Baseball playoffs are just not set up for a one-game system. Just because football is the most popular sport in the nation doesn’t mean that imitating it will bring more fans.

I really do not understand the logic of playing 162 games and adding more teams to the playoffs, after 162, shouldnt we know already who the best team is? Its the biggest sample scale in sports, we need less teams in the playoffs, not more. Its unfair to the team who won the most during the year to play a hot team over a small sample.

If you want to use that argument: is it fair that an 89 win team gets to set their pitching staff up against a 116 win team?

The whole point is to add incentive to win your division. If you don’t want to be the team that gets upset by that 85 win team, go out and win your division. A Wild Card team shouldn’t have the same advantages a #1 or #2 seed has when it comes to preparation.

Run that first part by me again but with different words. I don’t know what sort of scenario you’re setting up.

To basically repeat myself in reply to the second part, it flat out isn’t that easy. I don’t understand how you can think it’s fair to tell them “Go win your division!” and that’s it. It’s ok for one team to do worse in every aspect but be rewarded because they got lucky that their division sucked?

That’s less an argument for more playoff temas and more an argument against divisional alignment. I’m for the Wild Card and honestly I don’t have a big problem with this system. Playoff baseball and having additional spots for people to remain contenders longer increases revenue which helps the sport.

The current major problem with system as is, though, is that divisional alignment waters things down. I can see the position that you want to have a team in every region competing for a spot to draw more national attention, but it does result in weaker teams making a playoff run based on a hot streak (See 2006 Cardinals) while what is probably a better team overall misses the playoffs entirely (See 2006 Blue Jays).

This is kind of a band-aid solution. Is it better than what we currently have? Well, technically yes, in my opinion, BUT it’s a slippery slope because it will ALWAYS be potential problem as long as we have the current divisional setup (Look at the NFL playoffs last year where the Seahawks made it with a sub-.500 record and proceeded to knock off the defending champions).

Personally, I’d say the optimal solution from a fairness standpoint is to eliminate divisions entirely and just take the top four records in each league. I like having eight playoff teams.

“If you want to use that argument: is it fair that an 89 win team gets to set their pitching staff up against a 116 win team?”
This past season, there were three different teams within a turn through the rotation of each other from the Wild Card. If any of those four focused on setting up their pitching for the playoffs, they’re risking losing out on a spot entirely.

Piece, chunk, whatever, it’s all semantics. The basic point is that even if they shipped him out and ate the entire thing, they’ve still got about $40 million to spread around next season before they hit the luxury tax.

Yeah, call me old fashioned but playing 81-42 ball from mid April-August 31 seems like they might actually be able to contend for being one of the top 5 teams in the AL next season. For as bad as they played in September, and it was terrible, they scored the third most runs that month behind only Texas and Detroit. It was all pitching problems. I really doubt the Red Sox will go into next season without thoroughly upgrading their pitching staff, so yeah, they should be pretty damn competitive in 2012.

I don’t see a reason for hard slotting anyway. There’s no upside to it. The system’s fine the way it is, hard slotting doesn’t do anything but put more money in the owner’s pockets and alienate multi-sport talent.

As mnrun noted, it’s unfair to smaller market teams. Look at the drafting history of larger market teams like the Red Sox who basically built their farm in the last decade on signing overslot guys, which is unfair to teams like the Rays or A’s because the draft is basically where smaller market teams are forced to restock the talent they lost at the MLB level to free agency.

Hard slotting makes complete sense, the point of the draft is to help create a balance with the worst teams presumably getting the best players in the draft but because some teams are willing to go over slot and others are not this isn’t the case.

for example, how about requiring that some portion of revenue sharing money be spent on the draft? solutions like these encourage the competitive balance everyone is so concerned about without jeopardizing baseball’s young talent pool

I’d be fine with the slot price for top picks increasing, as well as the ability to trade picks. I just find the idea that the 5th most talented player in the draft falling to the 30th pick is a bit ridiculous simply due to the fact that he wants to be paid 3 times the amount he’d be slotted to make at 5 overall, if he was worth that he would have gone higher in the draft.

another way to combat that problem is greater compensation for teams that fail to sign those top talents (that pick next year, plus a squeeze pick? there’s room to be creative here)

you’d have to add some stipulations to make sure teams made fair offers, but again these are better ways to mitigate the problem you’re talking about without risking the loss of multi-sport athletes and top high school talents

I can’t imagine what possible sitpulation you’d have to include to get the MLBPA to sign off on that. You are essentially taking away all of their leverage…the team actually has incentive NOT to sign the player.

The draft should stay the EXACT same. Teams who don’t put adequate money into the draft are just dumb. I don’t care if it’s a small market team, the money isn’t crazy.

Also, a significant downside to hard-slotting is you would be losing some players to other sports who have more lucrative bonuses. The MLB still can’t compete with say top NFL picks, but without the hard slotting they can sign non elite but still good prospects from other sports by going overslot. Also, they can pay extra to try and get high profile HS players out of their college commitment and get them in their system a few years early.

hard-slotting doesn’t hurt their leverage? nonsense. i’m spitballing here and it still works out ok: stipulate that a team gets the same pick next year if they offer slot money. if they go X% over slot with an offer, they get additional compensation. boom

1. All teams who aren’t willing to spend at least around $10m on their TOTAL draft class is dumb, no matter how much revenue they bring in.
2. If there is slotting in the draft, it hurts small market teams just as much or more as big market teams. Several big market teams like the Yankees don’t spend big on the draft. On the flipside, a team like the Red Sox does. If you take away the Red Sox ability to spend big on the draft, they’ll just reallocate the extra money to the IFA signings, and there would be a bigger gap in that area. Hard slotting would just be a band-aid for poorly run teams.
3. The players being drafted make more than some veterans because the market demands it. Young baseball players get screwed compared to other sports, and baseball veterans have a better deal than veteran players in any sport. I could care less that the top 5-10 picks make a good signing bonus..they deserve it and it’s still considerably less than the NFL’s system even after slotting. On the flipside, NFL players can be FA’s after 4-5 years. In baseball, they rot in the minors for 2-4 years and then upon promotion to the MLB they have 6 years of cheap cost controlled years.

All the more reason for 1 draft that also includes international players. You don’t see the NHL and NBA, all new players should be subject to the draft its ridiculous that you’ve got one set of standards for American players and another for international.

As a Jay fan I’m excited for a second wildcard, it does 2 things, it allows another team in and gives more advantage/incentive to winning the division (you wont have to face the wildcards ace game 1/twice)

As a baseball fan however, I think i hate it. Hows that for some fence sitting

What if they just got rid of divisions entirely and made every team play every other team an equal amount of times at home and road? To me, thats much more important than playoff structure, in fact, they can go ahead and add as many playoff teams as they want if this happened. It logical at least, letting teams like the Jays play the RS/Yanks/Rays a hell of a lot more times than teams in the West and Central is not.

“Seem” being the operative word. This assumption also requires that one assume the the Yankees, Rays and Red Sox all either regress or stagnate. A bad draft or two could kill the Rays for a few years, but the Sox and Yanks are unlikely to stop being competetive anytime soon. This CLEARLY helps a team like the Jays, Rays or Orioles who are stuck in a division with a perpetually competetive large market team.

I think the best playoff format was the one before 1969 where one single
team from each league competes against the other. That pretty much
guarantees that the best team of AL is facing against best team of NL.
With more wild cards, it simply means that the teams that are hot in
September have the best chance of going far in postseason. Baseball seasons are not a marathon anymore.

Sometimes I wonder whether there is even enough talent for 30 teams to exist and compete on the same level.

I’ve seen it a lot, just not with very much explanation as to why. Why is Houston the most likely to join the AL West and not say, the Brewers who were already an AL team, or the Diamondbacks moving Houston/Milwaukee to the NL West?

From what’s been explained to me, the reason the Brewers won’t be going is because of Selig’s old ties to them. And moving the D’backs requires that you move two teams into new divisions, plus with Crane trying to be approved as the new owner of the Astros the league has leverage on them/him.

The Brewers also have the same problem as the Diamondbacks, as geographically, moving a Wisconsin based team to the AL West would be senseless and there’re no AL Central teams that would be logical for the move.

Logically, for balance’s sake, they need to move a team from the NL Central to the AL West. The two furthest west teams in the NL Central are the Astros and the Cardinals. Aside from being much further East than the Astros, the Cardinals have been in the NL since the 1800’s and the Astros have only existed since the sixties.

All told, it’s really the only logical move, that doesn’t involve completely upending current alignment or outright relocating a team (Say moving the Marlins or Rays to the Nevada and putting them in the AL West and then moving the Pirates from the Central to the AL/NL East to compensate for the team that moved).

If you move the Brewers to the AL Central then the Royals could be moved to the AL West, that would work geographically. The Rangers would then also have another team in the same time zone in their division.

Why cant we have two 16 team leagues, no divisions, and every team plays each other equal times at home and away? The top 4 makes the playoffs, and screw interleague unless there’s some leftover games and then keep it to the minimum. That way we wouldnt have teams feasting on the unbalanced schedule and we would know who the actual best team is. We currently do not know this, we know who got hot for a week or two in september and october and then they win a WS, but as it stands the WS is not between the best overall teams. If we are going to decide the biggest sample scale by a very small one, whats the point? Why bother even playing the first 4 months?

I think it should go back to two divisions per league and the top two teams from each division should play each other. NL East winner should play the NL West second place team and vice- versa, same for the AL.

Many may not like the idea of the one game playoff, and I completely would be against it too if it did not open up a bigger opportunity for a team like the Jays (who I am a fan of). But that’s not what I want to get at with this post. It’s clear that this “pointless” game is being done for revenue purposes. They’ll make playoff merchandise for two teams that ultimately won’t be in the playoffs two days later, as well as other forms of media revenue. Personally I feel the addition of an extra playoff team kills any hope of interesting September playoff races. Just imagine, instead of those exciting game 162’s there were in the MLB, all 4 of those teams would just simply have been in the playoffs.